Rare fortuneteller could be worth, well, a fortune

Tuesday

Aug 30, 2011 at 12:01 AMAug 30, 2011 at 10:22 AM

VIRGINIA CITY, Mont. - The Gypsy sat for decades in a restaurant amid the Old West kitsch that fills this former gold-rush town, her unblinking gaze greeting the tourists who shuffled in from the creaking wooden sidewalk outside.

VIRGINIA CITY, Mont. — The Gypsy sat for decades in a restaurant amid the Old West kitsch that fills this former gold-rush town, her unblinking gaze greeting the tourists who shuffled in from the creaking wooden sidewalk outside.

Some mistook her for Zoltar, the fortune-telling machine featured in the Tom Hanks movie Big.

But until a few years ago, nobody, not even her owner, knew the nonfunctioning machine gathering dust in Bob’s Place was an undiscovered treasure.

The 100-year-old fortuneteller was an extremely rare find. Instead of dispensing a card like Zoltar, the Gypsy spoke your fortune from a hidden record player. When a nickel was inserted into her, her eyes would flash, her teeth would chatter and her voice would float from a tube extending out of the 8-foot-tall box.

Word got out when the Montana Heritage Commission began restoring the Gypsy more than five years ago, and collectors realized the machine was one of two or three “verbal” fortune tellers left in the world.

One of those collectors, magician David Copperfield, thinks she is even rarer.

“I think it’s only one of one,” Copperfield said.

Copperfield wanted the Gypsy to be the crown jewel in his collection of turn-of-the-century penny arcade games. He approached the curators about buying the Gypsy a few years ago.

Janna Norby, the Montana Heritage Commission curator who received the call from Copperfield’s assistant, said the bid was in the ballpark of $2 million.

But Heritage commission curators, representing the Gypsy’s owner — the state of Montana — rejected the idea, saying cashing in on this piece of history would be akin to selling their soul.

“If we start selling our collection for money, what do we have?” said Norby, the commission’s former curator of collections.

But Theo Holstein, a California collector and renovator, said he thinks the Gypsy is wasted in Virginia City and should be in a private collection for proper care. He said he is trying to gather investors to make a $3 million bid.

“It’s like they have the world’s best diamond and they just pulled it out of their mineshaft,” he said. “It’s good that it’s there and it survived, but now it really needs to be part of the world.”

Copperfield also said he is still interested.

That could put pressure on the state, which is facing hard fiscal times. The state agency that oversees the commission is not so quick to reject the idea of selling the Gypsy. Andrew Poole, deputy director of the Department of Commerce, said he has not seen any offers in writing, and if one were made, it would go through a process that includes scrutiny by the commission and the public.

The state inherited the Gypsy in 1998 when it paid $6.5 million to buy nearly 250 buildings and their contents in Virginia City and nearby Nevada City.